Lords of the Black Sands

by J. Edward Neill

  “Open,” he said. The machines living within the door recognized his voice. The hulking thing slid open, and he stepped into the darkness of his room.

  Inside was silence. The shadows, black and viscous, smothered all things.

  But he knew.

  Thessia…

  She was waiting on the bed.

  Dressed in dark silks.

  Her skin shining with oil.

  Her eyes wide and golden.

  He went to her, and said nothing. As he approached, he peeled away pieces of his armor and dropped them on the floor. Liberated from the shadows in which he’d locked himself, he felt free. He was alive, truly alive, far removed from the machine the rest of the world feared.

  He climbed atop the bed. Even in the dark, he saw questions taking shape on Thessia’s mouth. Touching her cheek, he brushed them away. He couldn’t tell her about Umbali, about Saeed, about anything his father willed. Knowing too much would mean her death.

  Instead, he tugged her closer. She wrapped her legs around his waist, and he lifted her silks.

  Thessia…the last living girl in a city of death.

  She should hate me.

  He closed his eyes and felt the world through his fingers. He touched her hair, ran his palm along her throat, and grazed the thin line of oil between her breasts. When his hands came to her waist, he pulled her close. Her thighs captured him, and her kisses made his heart bang against his ribs.

  Had there ever been another woman like her?

  In all his many centuries?

  No.

  She stripped away her silks and sat astride his lap. He slipped inside her, his eyes rolling back. Her moans lingered in his ear. He lost all sense of himself. There was no Nemesis here. No suffering. No swords. He felt himself on fire inside her, and he wished it would last forever.

  Holding her waist with his powerful hands, he heard her whispers. She uttered things in his ear, words he sensed only at the very border of perception. Her soft syllables were in the old tongue, a language he knew little of.

  But he understood enough.

  “…forget him,” she said.

  “…only you and I.”

  “…love.”

  What began as a slow, sensual rhythm caught fire and became something else. Seizing her shoulders, he pushed her down on the bed and made her groan, sweat, and die a thousand tiny deaths before climax.

  With her orgasm, he fell into a place from which he never wanted to rise. Her fingers dug into the hard muscles of his back, and he spent himself inside her with such force he feared she might cry out in pain.

  She clung to his shoulders, whispering, “Mine…mine…mine.”

  And then it was over.

  Like rain falling from leaves, she slid back onto the bed, and he sank onto the cushions away from her. Save for their shared pleasure, they were already worlds apart.

  After a long while, he rose in the shadows and wandered to a little round table somewhere in the room. He hadn’t come to the Pyramid in ages, and yet even in the dark he remembered everything.

  The bed.

  The table.

  The glass of water.

  He drank deeply of the cool liquid from a metal cup. Even the filters aboard his ship provided nothing so refreshing. By the time he thought to offer Thessia a sip, he’d drained the cup empty.

  As he stood there, naked, lost in bottomless thought, she spoke.

  “Will your father have me killed?”

  He surfaced slowly from the darkness into which he’d fallen. His first thought was to lie and tell Thessia, No, he’ll let you live so long as I am useful. But then he remembered the Pharaoh’s voice. ‘…the pretty thing you spared when her city rebelled against me…’ And doubt flooded him.

  “It has occurred to me…” His gaze wandered into nothing. “…if he desires your death, he’ll kill me first. My uses to him are limited, but as long as Father has enemies in the world, I will be allowed to continue. And you, I won’t lose you. I’ll destroy every Habiru if I must. I’ll put my father’s rivals in their graves. If it be his bidding, I’ll end the world before I let him hurt you.”

  She fell silent for a time. He wondered whether she judged him a liar, or whether she simply had no fear. He’d known her for seven years, and never once had she wept, whimpered, or begged for her life. Her softness in the bed was her strength in all other places.

  “What happens next?” she asked.

  “We sleep.” He filled the metal cup with fresh water. “And tomorrow, I carry out my father’s wish.”

  10

  In a wasteland far from everything, Galen sat beneath the stars and watched Elia sleep.

  In the pale starlight, his vision was almost as good as during the day. He squinted, and he saw the cuts on Elia’s face and arms had almost healed, while the hollows in her cheeks had filled out.

  For a few days, he’d thought she might die, either of infection or dehydration.

  But her thousand tiny wounds had sewn themselves shut. And the water they’d found in the annihilated Habiru camp had proven to be potable.

  “Resilient,” he said to the stars. “Have to give her that.”

  He lifted his supper—a grey-skinned lizard—to his mouth and snacked on another of the dead critter’s legs. The little bones crunched in his mouth, and the scaly flesh went down easy. The other lizard, he’d cooked for Elia in the shadow of a dune, and before sleeping she’d eaten the thing as if it were her last meal.

  “How’s that for dinner?” He smirked at the moon. “Lizard bones and beetles.”

  Anymore, food had no taste to him. He could eat almost anything on the planet: leaves, five-day dead animals, or fish plucked from poisonous fallout water. It was all nutritious, all the same. Compared to the rest of humanity, his body could draw ten times the energy from a fraction of the food. No sickness would ever touch him. No radiation lasted inside his bones.

  He was flesh and blood, to be sure.

  But not like Elia.

  Out here in the open desert, he worried for her. His wasn’t an anxious fear or sharp enough to be a distraction, but he had begun to understand his new follower. Something special lived inside the girl. Try though he did to disbelieve everything she said, he couldn’t find the lie.

  Well, except maybe the one.

  For all her honesty, he’d picked out a small something in her story that didn’t make sense. He hadn’t said a word about it, not yet. But someday soon he would.

  Those bi-nocles of hers.

  She’d have used them during the day to track me. Sometimes.

  The Lord’s eyes in the sky…they’d have found her. And little Nem would’ve shown up in his ship and made dust of her pretty skin.

  It didn’t add up, but then, none of it did. If she were the bait to lead the Nemesis to him, they’d have killed him already. If her bi-nocles were actually a tracking beacon or another of the Pharaoh’s toys, the Nemesis’ ship would’ve known he’d been hiding just inches under the sand.

  Instead of melting the hillsides all around him, they’d have needed just one shot.

  One little Scimitar…straight to my face.

  He didn’t want to, but he looked at Elia again. He was glad the Scimitars had missed her, too. He liked her more as she was.

  Alive.

  * * *

  “Wake up, kid.” He roused her just before dawn with a gentle swat against her shoulder.

  She stirred to life. He expected yawns, squints, or complaints about the early hour, but she simply sat up and looked at him. He could tell she wanted to rub her dry eyes, but out here in the flat wasteland, eye-rubs were begging for blindness. The sands were still mostly glass, the earth grey, black, and sharp for hundreds of miles in every direction.

  “Here.” He tossed another dead lizard onto her lap. “Caught it last night while you were dreaming. Fat one, too.”

  She knew it was too dangerous to start a fire out in the open, and so with a grimace she bit the th
ing’s tail off.

  “My name’s not kid, you know,” she said while chewing.

  “Oh?” He smirked. “Because I could’ve sworn you were four-hundred seventy-something years younger than me.”

  She shrugged. “Even so. Not kid. Call me something else. Please.”

  Fine, he thought. You want a different name. I suppose that’s easy enough.

  “Elia,” he muttered. “Eli, Elle, Eel. Lia, La La, Ella. No, none of those. How about Elly?”

  She smiled a rare smile. “Elly,” she said. “Yes. That’s what my older sister used to call me. The Nemesis—he killed her. Did you know?”

  He looked away to the east, where the first blue-grey light had softened the horizon.

  “No, Elly. I didn’t know. And it doesn’t matter,” he said. “He’s killed thousands. More likely, tens of thousands. We’ll be dead, too, if we don’t cross this desert quickly enough. We’ve got to get to the mountains, and to better shelter. I shouldn’t have let you sleep so long.”

  She stood, snatched up her satchel, and walked right past him, heading westward into the dark.

  All he could do was follow.

  For the next seven days, they walked—mostly at night and for a few hours after dawn—sometimes at dusk, when the skies turned unnatural colors. But never during midday. Never, for fear of the heat and the Habiru.

  They passed through valleys, crags, and sharp hillocks.

  They wended through forests without leaves, through warrens of glass branches and earth that cracked beneath their boots.

  And they crossed the desert, marching over great stretches of grey sand, dry and deadly for a week in every direction.

  The heat wasn’t as dire as it had been centuries ago. The ruined earth didn’t trap the sun’s energy as it once had, and the winds were constant. No matter what pace they walked, Galen barely broke a sweat. The shallow pools of brown fallout water and dinners of snakes, scorpions, and desert rodents didn’t bother him in the least. He could’ve lived for a hundred years in the desert, and he wouldn’t have complained.

  But Elly, poor Elly.

  Her hood, she kept low on her brow. He saw her face nonetheless. Cured of the cuts she’d suffered when he’d covered her with sand on the Habiru hillside, her skin smoldered. She wasn’t sunburned—they rarely walked more than an hour or two in the open.

  She has a fever.

  Fallout poisoning.

  On their eighth dawn in the desert, the red sun crawled over the horizon, veiled by a thin mask of clouds. To the end of sights, the sand ocean glittered and grey. The new day’s warmth swept in on the wind’s back, and clouds of dust circled in the distance.

  Galen hunkered beside Elly beneath a pale outcropping in the desert’s heart. A huge stone, dead and white, slanted over their heads, a shield against the wind and sun. When Elly slumped against his shoulder, he allowed it. She seemed a shadow of her former self, a weak thing near to shattering.

  “You’re out of your water pills, aren’t you?” he said. The sunlight crept into the shade beneath the giant rock, stopping just short of his booted toes.

  “Days ago,” she said. “I didn’t want to complain.”

  Her voice sounded hoarse. He felt her ragged breaths against his arm, and he sensed her weakness. Her big eyes were dim, their golden light fading.

  “I don’t know what it feels like, but I know what it looks like.” He slid a finger along her sweating forehead. “Are you dying, Elly?”

  Again, she managed a smile, though it faded swiftly.

  “You think this is the first time I’ve had fallout poisoning?” She sounded defiant. “No. I was stupid. I didn’t know how far you meant to travel. And I didn’t expect we’d cross…the desert.”

  She closed her eyes and let out a rattling sigh.

  Galen retreated into thought.

  She’s lying about something.

  I should leave it alone.

  No.

  “Where do you get your water pills?” he asked. “Tell me.”

  She shifted against him while murmuring something incomprehensible. She seemed ready to collapse into sleep, maybe even into death.

  He supposed anyone else on Earth’s Kingdom would’ve believed her act.

  She’s pretending to sleep.

  He couldn’t let it go.

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me.” He jostled her head with a roll of his shoulder. “Your little pills, the ones you use to treat the water you drink—who gives them to you?”

  “Hmmm? Oh.” She opened her eyes to slits. “Caches. Secret caches. Mother planted them in the countryside.”

  He shook his head. “No. Try again.”

  She looked up at him. Beneath her hood’s upper rim, he glimpsed her eyes. All it took was the smallest emotion flickering across her face.

  She understands.

  Maybe now she’ll spill it.

  “Okay,” she said, and her voice wasn’t as weak. “Someone…brings them to me. In the city-island where you found your papers, they used a boat. Before that, in the northern village, it was a courier on foot. People are helping me, which means they’re helping you. Do you understand?”

  “You knew we’d go west,” he said. “You know where I’m going.”

  Her silence meant yes.

  “Why didn’t you bring more pills?” he asked.

  “We…miscalculated,” she said. “We thought you’d wait until autumn. Wouldn’t have needed as much water. And we thought…we never guessed…you’d use the desert instead of the mountains.”

  He studied her eyes. This time, she wasn’t lying.

  “You’ve got allies,” he said.

  She sat up, wobbled, and stared at him.

  “You didn’t seriously think I did this all alone?” she countered. “I’m tough, and I can endure many things. But you’re one man on the Kingdom of Earth. Do you know what it takes to track you down, to keep you near enough to save when you make mistakes? Do you have any idea how many times you should’ve died? Do you?”

  The idea of being saved made him want to spit. He’d accepted Elly’s tales of oaths and centuries of watching, but the idea that someone was helping him, maybe even guiding him, didn’t sit right.

  I am Galen, he thought.

  No one helps me.

  No one knows anything about me.

  “How many people? How many spies?” He scraped his palm down his face, on which a prickly beard had begun to grow. “You have agents in the Nemesis’ service? Sleepers? How else could you get bi-nocles and water pills? How is it the Pharaoh’s eyes don’t see you and send soldiers to wipe you out? You think I haven’t noticed? You think I don’t see?”

  She turned away and pulled her hood lower.

  “These things, I won’t answer.”

  “I’ve a few knives that say you will,” he said.

  “So do it.” She pulled away. Her face was pallid, her chin slick with grey sweat. “Kill the only one here who cares about you. You’re a real piece of work, Galen. You’d think after five-hundred years you’d have figured out it’s not all about you. I know what you want, and I know where you’re going. And I hope you succeed, but not because I want to bend a knee to yet another tyrant. You can help us, you know? You’ve the best chance of ending this everlasting nightmare. But…god…you’re a real bastard sometimes. Your mother must’ve loved you hard, because I’m not sure anyone else ever could.”

  Her anger sapped her of her strength, and she sank to the darkness beneath the outcropping, shivering in a ball.

  He felt anger, too.

  No one questioned him. Not ever.

  No one lied to him and lived.

  No one calls me a bastard. I’m anything but. I’m just as immortal as they are.

  He wanted to let his rage sweep him away, to leave her lying in the sand, to march west and never look back.

  And yet…

  He shook his head, swallowed his pride, and stayed right where he was. The storm died inside him
, and with another breath he recaptured his calm.

  Scooting to Elia’s side, he helped her sit up, holding her close to his shoulder. She resisted at first, but soon relented and sank against him once again.

  “It’s fine. You don’t have to tell me your secrets,” he said. “If I keep you alive, you’ll help me?”

  She peered up at him, and a tiny light flickered in her big eyes.

  “It’s why I’m here,” she said. “The only reason.”

  And she slept the day away.

  * * *

  He’d never done anything like it before.

  Ever in his life.

  Alone, he trekked far into the desert and returned with water from hidden springs. He bundled sticks from skinny trees and handfuls of ragged weeds, the perfect things with which to build fires. He caught lizards, birds, and mice, and brought them back to the shadowed alcove in which Elia slept.

  He did these not for himself.

  But for her.

  For five days, he neither spoke nor slept nor dwelled in thought of what awaited him in the west. He propelled all darker matters far from his mind. Centuries of solitude had taught him many things, foremost among them was the power to focus.

  On the now. On the here.

  He fed Elia. Watered her. Washed the sand from her face. Hung his cloak from the rock as a curtain against the sun. She slept through it all, and so his work was tedious.

  Scooping tiny pieces of cooked meat into her mouth.

  Watering her one drop at a time.

  Carrying clumps of urine-filled sand into the desert.

  He couldn’t have said why he did it. Caring for another living thing hadn’t ever been a piece of the Galen puzzle. Where he journeyed, where he meant to go, no one was meant to follow.

  She’ll die before I get there, he knew.

  She’s too slow. Too weak. Too mortal.

  And yet…

  On the sixth eve, as the heat fled and the wind made his cloak dance in the twilight dust, he knelt to wash her face. The water he’d brought, taken from places only he knew, was pure. With a damp piece of her cloak he’d torn away, he worked the dust and sand away from her eyes.